Anarchos Training Methods: A Brief History

Today, February 11th 2019, I announced to my existing clients that I’ll be changing the name of my company from TZ Strength to Anarchos Training Methods. This post will serve as a brief explanation of that change, accompanied by a short history of the road that has led us here.

2005: First Exposure

My entire athletic background pre-CrossFit was varied martial arts. In 2005, I tried Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for the first time and ended up training for about six months. One of my coaches at the time was a brown belt named Mike Weaver. Along with teaching BJJ, Mike was a trainer at the original CFHQ in Soquel, CA. When I signed up for the 2005 U.S. Open, I asked him about getting in shape for the tournament. He told me about CrossFit and gave me a workout to do – I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a scaled version of “Barbara”.

I did it in my parents front yard with strict pullups, and like most people, my first experience hit me like a ton of bricks. I did workouts here and there before jumping in full bore in March of 2006, and I haven’t looked back since.

2008-2009: CrossFit Monterey, First Competitor

In July of 2008, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to open a gym in my hometown of Monterey, CA (alright alright, technically my hometown is Pacific Grove, but no one knows what that is). Opening and running CFM was probably the single most formative experience of my life. I was 19 at the time, and like most 19 year olds, a complete idiot. Well, running a brick-and-mortar business, especially one as unstable as a gym, will grow you up real quick.

And so it did. I learned a lot, mostly about how poorly equipped I was to run a business. Lucky for me, I had a lot of help, and things went relatively smoothly once my business partner and I had our feet under us.

My first experience with both remote coaching and competitor coaching came in 2009, when I started coaching a tremendous athlete from the UK named Owen. This dude was an absolute beast, and by far the highest caliber of athlete I had worked with at the time. I only wish I’d been a better coach then!

2013: TZ Strength

In 2013, I took a team and three individuals to NorCal Regionals. Within about six months, seven of those nine athletes would be gone.

Monterey is a small town, and the population largely falls into two groups: newlyweds and nearly deads. The large majority of people who were of the age and disposition to be serious competitors were in the military, and were stationed in Monterey for 6-18 months on average while they studied at either the Naval Postgraduate School or the Defense Language Institute. After the NorCal Regional, I realized that if I was serious about working with high level competitors, I was going to have to go remote.

Thus TZ Strength was born. It was slow going at first, but that wasn’t an issue – I had no intent, at the time, to turn it into a business. In September of 2013 I took on my first paying client. He and another athlete from his gym qualified for Regionals, and they opted to go team with the rest of their competitors. That team took fifth in the Mid-Atlantic Region. Within a month or so of that event, I went from having fewer than ten individual clients to well over twenty. The majority of my time was being spent on TZ Strength, and it became clear that I was going to have to make a decision. In December of 2014, my business partner and I sold CrossFit Monterey. I’ve been working remotely full time ever since.

2014-2015: Philosophy Happens, Interests Broaden

Around the same time that I started TZ Strength, I began to feed a burgeoning interest in philosophy.

Philosophy, done well, changes everything. It changes the way you look at the world, yourself, and the people around you. It makes you think and act differently. And so it was for me. Over the course of the last half decade, the way I think about and act on the process of training has changed in ways that are so fundamental they may often be hard to see (and that certainly go well beyond the scope of this post.)

In 2015, I returned to my athletic roots by getting back to BJJ, and this time I stuck with it. Four years later, it is as big a part of my life as philosophy or CrossFit/Strength & Conditioning.

TZ Strength was a vehicle with a relatively narrow focus: produce competitive CrossFit athletes, and provide excellent programming for group fitness based gyms (mostly CrossFit affiliates, but they’re not the only ones doing the good work out there!) It was a good vehicle for this purpose, but I found myself in need of a bigger trunk to carry all this junk.

2019: Anarchos Training Methods

ATM is the car with the bigger trunk. My aim is to explicitly incorporate philosophy into my work here, as I have been doing implicitly with my clients for years now. I also hope to expand my offerings to work more with combat sport athletes (because I love it), create more services for gyms (because you’re saving lives), and to produce unique and helpful content for coaches and athletes across the spectrum of fitness and sport.